Nvidia Just Built Its Own Gaming Supercomputer: The Grid

Nvidia wants to make an Amazon of gaming — perfectly smooth, perfectly simple, superbly rendered PC games steamed to your system as if you owned an expensive rig. And so, here’s a GPU tower that the company says will do just that, by combining 700 Xbox 360s in one tall box. Internet, meet The Grid.

Each Grid rack contains 240 Nvidia GPUs that stream titles to your “smart” TV. At Nvidia’s CES demo, the company showed its streaming software on an LG LCD TV—Trine 2 looked perfectly smooth running at 1080p (albeit in the same room as the server itself). The same game was then brought up on a Transformer Prime tablet with an Nvidia Grid app, picking up exactly where the game was left off on the television. Think Kindle chapter syncing, only with blowing things up for fun.

Nvidia plans to license the Grid software to a handful of companies in the US and abroad (no word on Australia yet), allowing them to use Nvidia’s rack hardware to beam streaming games to their customers.

Nvidia claims this project has five years of engineering behind it, and with a brand new, custom-built GPU specified for cloud gaming, this could sure be the best of its kind, so long as you’ve got a good connection.

this will be great!!! if all i want to play is civilization... or chess... or blackjack... or anything else where timing and lag won't matter.

for any other real games that rely on reflexes, or timing... it won't matter how amazing the supercomputer is, the bottleneck is in the pipe out the back, then through the country's congested network, then across the ocean, then through another country's congested network, then to your machine. the gaming experience will suck!

Now drag that 110" samsung TV over and g this beast in and run Crysis 2 or something of that nature at 4k resolution please!! or find an 8k tv laying around, surely there is one hiding at CES somewhere...